Choices
Infinity is a terrible thing
There are too many options in life. I’m no communist; I believe in free will. But this has gone overboard.
Maybe it’s age or lack of free time, but the more I want to try new things, the harder it gets, and the better it feels to return to the comfort of the familiar.
And God forbid you actually want to learn something outside your comfort zone and open up YouTube. The infinite loop that presents itself is exhaustingly entertaining.
Every time you find someone who says something that makes you think, “yes, that makes sense,” stay five more minutes and you’ll get an oscillating feed of people who can convincingly prove the exact opposite.
I’m done with all this.
Here is what I’m doing about it.
Food
Fad diets, unpronounceable ingredients, mushroom coffee, superfoods, antioxidants, organic meats, free-range animals that prefer to be caged. $200 for four ounces of beef that came from a drunk, lazy cow.
I’m back to grains, good protein that was previously frozen unless I know who butchered it, and vegetables.
Olive oil, salt, pepper, a few spices, some lemon juice.
Medium heat. Twenty to thirty minutes. You’ll have a meal more satisfying than 90% of restaurants.
Restaurants used to serve a real purpose: feeding travelers days away from home. Now I don’t know what purpose they serve anymore.
Yes, you get fed. But finding one you like in a moment of need in a foreign place has become like solving a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces.
I don’t want to wait in line or read made-up reviews or spend half my time taking pictures of my food. I just want to be served politely and quickly until I no longer feel hungry.
When traveling, unless someone local takes me somewhere they trust, I will walk around and peek inside. If it looks full and people are not snapping pictures of their plates, I will scan the menu for familiar ingredients and eat there.
When all else fails, I’m going to P.F. Chang’s.
Clothes
I don’t even know where to start on this one.
I’ve never enjoyed shopping for clothes. Not because I prefer running around naked. I believe in decency, and insulation.
Clothes should be clean, comfortable, functional, and last a long time.
Today, try going to a store to buy something. The options are limited and the salespeople uninterested. They would rather you buy online and return what you don’t like, saving overhead while they track your “buying behaviors.”
I don’t want to pick from a thousand options online. I can barely tell what a color is in person, let alone on a large screen with heavily adulterated imagery.
I want to go to one place where someone looks at me, asks a few questions, then brings me clothes I can try on once, buy, and leave with.
Or maybe someone can invent a nano-synthetic fabric that is hypoallergenic and self-multiplies until it coats your entire body and projects an image of what you should look like, like a walking banner.
Until then, my wardrobe will continue shrinking to the bare essentials.
I will spend a disproportionate amount of money on comfortable underwear and socks, and continue to shop at the PGA store in obscure airports or Dick’s Sporting Goods for monochromatic quarter-zips that hug my body and tell me everything will be ok.
Work
The number of things you can do for work is pretty much infinite.
Despite the fear being put into us that AI will take all our jobs, the global unemployment rate is roughly 5 percent.
That means 95 percent of the population is working.
How much they make and what indignities they must suffer to earn that wage is a different story.
With enough time and willpower, you can learn almost anything today. If you are willing to compromise on pay, you can probably do that work somewhere.
I haven’t figured that one out completely yet, but I would like work to become something physical that is actually useful to someone.
I don’t want to type something into a keyboard that gets regurgitated back to me by another machine, then forwarded to others who gather around screens to discuss what I wrote, then each write something back that circulates to even more people in an endless, decision-less cycle.
Every human needs to produce one thing that goes into a bigger thing produced by other humans who sell it back as one thing to many humans.
Everything else in between needs to stop.
Cars
This was an area of solace that I enjoyed that is now ruined.
The manual transmission is pretty much dead.
The tens of billions spent on the EV revolution are now being hastily written off by the large automobile manufacturers, but they have left us with remnants of technology that have made every car feel like entering a large iPhone suppository on wheels.
Cars no longer have a soul. They want you to sit back on plush leather seats and enjoy the ride.
I am waiting for someone to bring back the twin-turbo V8, tie it to a six-speed manual, and put it into the most uncomfortable chassis possible. I want the engine to transmit all its mechanical gesticulations directly to the back of my spine so that after an hour of driving my kidneys shift left by half an inch.
Turning the steering wheel should feel like doing a bicep curl. The air-conditioning should run off a dedicated compressor that produces so much heat it could boil water in an offline compression chamber that generates another 79 horsepower just because it can.
Until then, I will keep driving my trusty and highly comfortable GMC pickup. It has a volume knob and a proper on-off switch for the climate control.
The cup holders, though? Not that great.
Conclusion
I am not angry.
Quite the opposite — I am grateful for the abundance we experience in the modern world.
Many are experiencing wars, famine, civil unrest, or some combination of all three. For them, having safety, shelter, and something to eat is a blessing.
I am just growing tired of the proliferation of wasteful choice and would prefer a simpler existence.
Three options for everything would be ideal. And a trusted independent authority figure who tells you what works without being paid to do so.
Is that too much to ask?